Drastic Measures

PRISM Quartet presents a program celebrating the XAS Records re-release of the group’s groundbreaking first album (1990, The PRISM Quartet on Koch International).  Spanning four decades of music making, the program features three works from the original disc by Jean-Baptiste Singelée, Russell Peck, and Matthew Levy, plus two recent compositions: Tiny Machines by Bill Ryan and Hikikomori: Silent Disappearance by Renee Baker.

The Program

Premier Quatour, Op. 53 (1857) by Jean-Baptiste Singelée
I. Andante – Allegro
II. Adagio sostenuto
III. Allegro vivace
IV. Allegretto

Drastic Measures (1976) by Russell Peck
I. Poco adagio, molto espressivo
II. Allegro

Lament (1986) by Matthew Levy

Tiny Machines (2017/2024) by Bill Ryan

Hikikomori: Silent Disappearance (2024) by Renee Baker (world premiere, new arr.)

PRISM Quartet (new album cover)

PRISM Quartet (original album cover)

About the Music

A longtime friend of Adolphe Sax, the inventor of the saxophone (they met as students at the Royal School of Music), Jean-Baptiste Singelée encouraged Sax to develop the four principal members of the saxophone family. In his liner notes for PRISM Quartet’s very first recording (1990, Koch International), Charles Passy writes, “An accomplished violinist, composer, and conductor in his native Belgium, Jean-Baptiste Singelée (1812-1875) is credited with writing the first saxophone quartet ever. His Premier Quatour dates some 11 years after Sax’ patent of 1846 and is conceived in the traditional quartet format as defined by Haydn. Its four movements respectively pay homage to four renowned composers of the time, Rossini, Beethoven, Mendelssohn, and Meyerbeer. The quartet also establishes the subtle timbral differences among the four members of the saxophone family.”

The genesis of Drastic Measures by Russell Peck dates back to the composer’s proximity to saxophonists during his time in academia. He writes, “During my brief university teaching career I came into contact with excellent saxophonists at Northern Illinois University who had a quartet and wanted a piece from me. That’s how I came to write Drastic Measures in 1976. A year later I went to the School of the Arts in North Carolina where James Houlik had a great saxophone studio and a wonderful student quartet that became the New Century Saxophone Quartet. I touched up the piece for them and that became its final form. The first movement is slow, lyrical and polyphonic, highlighting the serious capabilities of the ensemble. The virtuosic second movement is more blues, jazz, and rock-oriented, and highly energized, even including slap-tongue accents. It’s also rhythmically complex. What maintains the classical integrity of the piece despite the popular flavor in the second movement is its tight formal coherence. A three note motive heard as an accompaniment figure at the very opening of the first movement becomes the basis for the whole piece, reaching several climactic expressions in the second movement.”

Pew Fellow and PRISM Quartet’s resident composer, Matthew Levy, describes the impetus for Lament: “My father, Philadelphia painter and printmaker Julian Levy, passed away in 1973 when I was nine years old. In 1986, as a young man of 22, I arranged an exhibit of his work at Kerrytown Concert House in Ann Arbor, where I attended the University of Michigan. PRISM, which I co-founded just a couple of years earlier, commemorated the opening with a special performance for which I composed Lament, my first of many works for the quartet. Lament is a rather short work, but in it, I sought to express the grief of losing my beloved father, and a yearning for his presence in all the years that followed.”

Winner of the American Composers Forum Champion of New Music Award, Bill Ryan creates music rooted in minimalism, jazz, and popular music. His music is energetic, evocative and deeply personal, and has been described as “constantly threatening to burst at the seams, were those seams not so artfully structured…rarely has music this earthy been so elegant.” (Gramophone Magazine). Ryan describes Tiny Machines: “A few years ago I visited the Ford truck assembly plant in Dearborn, Michigan to make field recordings of its massive assembly line. I was led by a plant manager on an elevated walkway above the various stations so I could observe and record. Each station along the line had a singular, focused goal, which was realized in about a minute. Station after station, it was a complex web of equipment, robotics and personnel. There was a beautiful rhythm and choreography to it all, with a completed truck coming off the line every 53 seconds. Tiny Machines is my nod to this process. It is a collection of ten miniature musical ‘machines.’ Through carefully constructed interlocking parts and gestures, each movement is an energy-filled study of musical mechanisms.” (Adapted from a piano work by the composer for the Sinta Quartet)

Composer Renee Baker is the founding music director and conductor of the Chicago Modern Orchestra Project, a polystylistic orchestra that grew from the plums of both classical music and jazz. A practicing Sannyasi, she contributes a new adaptation of her work, Hikikomori: Silent Disappearance (2024), to the program. She penned a poem as a program note for the work:

Hikikomori: Silent Disappearance

Retreat
A dimly lit room
Air feels heavy, almost suffocating.
Burden of a thousand thoughts
Weight of existence dulling senses.
Softly, almost whispering
I have chosen to disappear
To fade into the walls.

To silence the noise of the world.
Here, where time stands still
Unravel the knots of my mind.
I cannot escape
The silence is too loud
Gnawing at my sanity
Echoing my own madness

Desperate, almost screaming
I cannot escape
The silence is too loud
It pierces through me
Gnawing at my sanity.
I thought I could find peace here

I am alone.
Truly alone.
But in this solitude, a strange comfort.
I am no longer fighting the silence.
I am becoming it.
Fading to Silence….
Off into Nothingness..

(Arranged for PRISM Quartet)

Renee Baker

Bill Ryan

TICKETS
Tickets are $10, $22.50, or $35 General Admission (pay-what-you-wish).

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This program is presented with generous support from the Michigan Arts and Culture Council, the Alice M. Ditson Fund of Columbia University, and Meridian Winds.

ACCESSIBILITY
PRISM Quartet welcomes all individuals to our concerts, and provides a variety of accommodations for those with disabilities in accordance with the Americans with Disabilities Act. For specific accommodations, please contact info@prismquartet.com or 215.438.5282.